A friend recently asked me why I don't want kids. I answered, two reasons:
First, because I'm basically allergic to children. But second, because there
are things I want to do with my life, and I can't do them if my remaining good
years are consumed by child-rearing.

(once I would have added "because humans suck and I don't want to make more
of them", but getting out of end user support for the last few years has made
me slightly less misanthropic)

She came back a couple of days later and asked "okay, there are things you
want to do with your life; what things?"

This is something I've thought about more than usual recently. Some changes
in my life have left me wondering "what next?"

Over the last couple years, for the first time, I've achieved something like
financial stability. I have a career that will keep me paid for as long as IT
is needed, and I'm well past the "breaking into the industry" barrier. I'm
finally in a position where I can do what I choose to do instead of what I need
to do.

But what, specifically? I wasn't thinking of anything specific when I said
it. My beef with long-term, irrevocable responsibility isn't "I won't be able
to work on some specific thing", but "I won't be able to work on any
other specific thing, details to be determined later."

I answered my friend with the first things that came to mind. I have
personal projects and fanfiction and toy programs and other Stuff, I want to
create, and it's hard enough to keep my mind on track when I don't
have screaming babies eating my time and attention.

But there's more to it than that. I create because I enjoy creating. But on
a separate mind-track, I also want to do something that matters.

II.

You are a member of the species that did that. Never forget what we are
capable of, when we band together and declare battle on what is broken in the
world.

This quote always makes me tear up. There's no lack of important things to
do in the world, and fewer limits on what we can achieve than we think.

I don't identify with the
effective altruist movement, but I've read enough of their stuff to be
convinced that most of the causes most people worry about are tempests in a
teapot. Contemporary U.S. politics has gone basically insane and its poison has
infected even people I know and respect. We use up all our outrage and our hate
on each other while dark
gods rape the world.

Norman
Borlaug's crew ushered in the Green Revolution, ended famine on the Indian
subcontinent and saved one billion lives. Forget Tyson vs Holyfield or
whatever today's equivalent is; I want to see Borlaug vs Malthus.

It's hard to overstate the significance here. As a species, we are going toe
to toe with two of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and we are holding
the line.

As apocalyptic crusades go, one I wouldn't mind raising the flag for is
anti-aging (to stick to the four horsemen metaphor, let's identify aging with
Death). Aging kills more people than all other causes put together, and brings
decades of misery to all of them as their bodies -- or, worse, their brains --
disintegrate around them. I'm 34. I haven't hit decrepitude yet, but I'm well
on my way. When I get into that fight, I want a knife up my sleeve.

Another friend, when the subject came up, said that curing aging is a pipe
dream, at least in our lifetime. I replied: We killed smallpox. We put boots on
the Moon. We do heart transplants. We took the power that makes the sun burn in
the sky and we made it our servant.

The ancient alchemists dreamed of the Philosopher's Stone, which could grant
eternal life, or turn lead into gold. Pipe dreams?

I am a member of the species that did these things. I will not forget what
we are capable of.

III.

So, what next?

I don't know. I was only semi-serious about aging above; the most
significant anti-aging organization I'm aware of is SENS, and they don't need
IT engineers -- or if they do they're not advertising it. I can send money
their way, but it doesn't help figure out what to do with my life. The same
goes for the crusaders against Famine and Pestilence. They might need my money,
but I'm pretty sure they don't need me.

I can purchase utilons with money. The warm fuzzy feeling of using talent
well is harder to come by.

The obvious Important Tech Related Thing is AI research, but I have no
expertise in that field and don't expect I can contribute much. I do
infrastructure, and that is valuable, but much of that value is wasted running
social experiments, marketing, clickbait, and the Internet's endless hate
parade.

(and whenever I feel my misanthropy slipping, I remind myself that Facebook
exists because these things are what most people want)

There are some infrastructure-related windmills I tilt
at, like the way open Internet protocols have mostly been replaced by
closed-garden Web applications even when the web browser is so far from the
right tool that it's technically in an alternate universe. Changing that is
problematic. Not because modern, open replacements couldn't be written, or that
I'm not capable of writing them, but because users do not care.

Another possibility: running infrastructure or doing development for an
organization that does Something Valuable and Awesome. Something that isn't
mostly composed of negative externalities. That's a tough problem, because IT
management is often outsourced. But it seems like a solvable problem.